As I veer off-road towards a long-abandoned gas station, my heart skips a beat. Was that… a person? No, I tell myself, it couldn’t be. I kill the engine. Shutting the car door and walking sheepishly down the once unassuming dirt road, I clutch my crowbar tightly as my mind begins to race. While I’ve spent the last half an hour happily scouring abandoned cabins along the forest, this quiet summer night didn’t seem eerie, just still. Now as I sneak through the trees just a few feet further down from where I was moments ago, that sense of calm evaporates, overtaken by a creeping unease.
When I sat down to play Pacific Drive at WASD, I mistook it for an atmospheric walking simulator. In reality, Ironwood Studio’s forest opus is something far more sinister. Part survival game, part narrative-led horror, you may recognise Pacific Drive as “that weird nightrider car game from E3”. Yet while the slightly beat up set of wheels took centre stage in all the trailers, this first-person project isn’t really a charming vehicle-first romp but an adventure where your car is the only thing keeping you from an early grave.
Inspired by a slew of different horror novels and the folk tales that whispered their way around the Pacific Northwest, this first-person adventure sees you attempting to uncover the mysteries surrounding a particularly cursed looking area of forest. Set in the once idyllic scenery of the aforementioned Pacific Northwest, you find yourself navigating the ever-changing dangers of the Olympic Exclusion Zone, seeking shelter from its extreme weather, radiation poisoning, and a series of increasingly inexplicable happenings, all by hiding inside your trusty four-wheeled companion. You have to gather as much information and loot as you can on each run to the Zone before getting the hell out of there.
At first I was tasked with making a few repairs to generators within the zone, tracking down the required scrap to do so, and what I initially assumed was a fairly linear path suddenly unfolded into a gargantuan forest. As my surroundings felt increasingly alien, I found myself backing slowly towards my car’s blinking indicator lights.
Where Bloober Team's Blair Witch pitted the player against supernatural horrors with a loyal Alsatian by your side, Pacific Drive sees you form a similar bond with your sweet ride. Driving is functional yet unremarkable, and an iPad-style sat-nav is used for navigation. It feels good, glancing away from the road to the map in real-time, as you attempt to figure out your bearings and reach the next destination. It’s details like this that make the rusty station wagon feel like just as important a character in this story as you are, and you’ll need to take care of it.
This is done in a garage, which you can set up as a base of operations. When you return from trips to the zone you can repair and modify the vehicle, improving how it handles and making it feel your own. It’s also during these bits of downtime where you prepare yourself, both mentally and literally, to head back into the creepy exclusion zone.
From what I’ve played so far, each run feels entirely different and it’s in this unpredictability that I find myself reminded of Kojima’s P.T. Silhouettes flicker in the darkness, piles of scrap metal move inexplicably towards you, and if you’re really unlucky, you may even find yourself caught up in the sentient lightning zone storms, which obliterate anything and everything in their path.
Unlike many of its survival peers, Pacific Drive has a strong story weaved throughout. As you roam the silent outskirts looking for working generators, a pair of overly talkative survivors natter away on the walkie talkie. While their requests and observations initially feel distracting, there’s a moment when I stumbled upon a collection of eerily-posed mannequins – the silence was ominous, and I wished those distant companions would call me back to help ease the tension. I’m told that as I continue exploring, there will be answers that explain all of these baffling occurrences, slowly revealing what went on to distort this once peaceful place and the origins of the secretive ARDA organisation whose footprints are all over the eerily abandoned area.
Pacific Drive also has a surprisingly complex crafting system. Armed with a tool named a scrapper, it makes short work of radios and other mechanical or electrical devices, stripping the once-prized possessions down to their core parts in order to mash together vital new contraptions. Lockers can be prised open, fuel can be syphoned from hastily abandoned cars, and there’s a welcome sense of believability to how the rules of this world operate, authentically selling the eerie survivor fantasy.
It’s this quiet commitment to realism which makes it all the more unsettling when Pacific Drive’s supernatural occurrences rear their paranormal head. As I gleefully strip a cabin of its owners' worldly possessions, a chunk of rock suddenly and violently lurches into the air, before dropping to earth with an almighty THUMP. It scares the life out of me, and as I brandish my trusty crowbar, I soon realise this gravity-defying occurrence seems to be stuck on some kind of loop. Is this the aftermath of a zone storm occurrence? A glitch? Or an eerie warning from the very land itself? I don’t find out during the demo, but I want to know more.
Overall, I left my short time with Pacific Drive eager to return. Even in WASD’s bustling convention hall I found myself completely caught up in the strange, ethereal atmosphere of the Olympic Exclusion Zone. There’s more than a whiff of Remedy Control’s ‘new weird’ aesthetic to Pacific Drive, and a pleasing sense of variety to its ever changing and consistently threatening landscapes. On paper Pacific Drive borrows from a number of other easily identifiable games, yet each individual gameplay element meshes together to create an experience quite unlike anything else. The recent decision to delay the game to early 2024 to provide extra polish is a smart one too, and I can’t wait to return to this inevitably even more twisted vision of the Pacific Northwest, although this time, I’m not putting my crowbar down.